Remembering Our Place in the Natural World

By Ali Ahmed

It was well below zero outside and
dark, and my breath, quickly turning to cloud, seeks its forebears in the
heavens above. But even though walking in this landscape makes me at times
fancy myself a walker in our mythic
North, straddling alongside “the Dorset giants who drove the Vikings back to
their long ships,” Bank Street, however cool, is still an incredible stretch of
the imagination away from Al Purdy’s North, or the tundra
of Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. Perhaps owing to
that dissimilarity, I don’t carry food in my backpack, but instead a small copy
of notes from the journals of Thoreau—that inimitable man, that
Harvard graduate who gave up human boundaries to make himself at home in the
woods. And I think I have Gary Snyder—the poet laureate of Deep Ecology—in there too,
somewhere.

Snyder

That
Beat of a poet,

that
bead-wearing monk

of
a Zazen poet

Part
mountain ranger,

part
“intro-naut”

Later, sitting in one of the front
pews in Southminster United Church, the time at least 5 minutes past 7, I
wonder why J.B. Mackinnon hasn't taken the stage yet. But, having come to a talk on nature, perhaps I had
someone the likes of John Muir or Edward Abbey in my head, and am a
bit surprised when Neil Wilson, the director of the Writers’ Festival, introduces
J.B. and a young looking fellow in a plaid shirt steps onto the stage.

Mackinnon has just recently released
his book The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could
Be. As the title might suggest, it is a work of historical ecology, or the
history of nature, today and into the future. The bookseller blurbs say that “The
Once and Future World began in the moment J.B. MacKinnon realized the
grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed
it to be.” I feel however that it has its genesis a bit before that; before
he realized that the wilderness he had seen in his childhood was far from
“pristine” and closer to an illusion. When James once returned to his home in
the interior grasslands of B.C., he discovered that the land had been
turned into a housing development. It was this personal encounter with a memory
hijacked by development that led him to his research, only to realize that what
he remembered was in itself artificial.

In his childhood, he had seen the Red Fox as the biggest beast on
the land, but when he started looking into the matter, he found out that the
Fox wasn’t even a native species, and was instead introduced to the grasslands
in the 1700s. In fact, it was the Grizzly Bear that was the
biggest native animal.

How
many of us have been fortunate enough to see a whale…in the wild? Mackinnon
says that 150 years ago, the whale population was thriving, and the Great Whale used to swim into Vancouver waters. But by 1908, the abundant
whale population had been hunted into obscurity. And by now, our present time,
the disappearance is normal, as if this is the way it has always been.
But, Mackinnon says, “if we are aware of their presence in the past, then their
absence would seem abnormal.”

As he expands his research, Mackinnon
finds that this capacity to readily forget is characterized by the term
“Shifting Baseline Syndrome,” a term that was initially coined by fisheries
scientist Daniel Pauly in 1995. Pauly
describes the syndrome thus: “Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as
baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers,
and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career,
the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve
as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a
gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…"

Generation after generation our reference points slip, and we accept
compromises for reality. “We excuse, permit, adapt — and forget” writes
Mackinnon. What we need, he says, is a process of Re-wilding, reacquainting
ourselves with the natural world. While the idea is not at all new—Thoreau
firmly believed that in wildness lay the salvation of the world—Mackinnon
applies it on a large scale, perhaps knowing full well that the human species,
for the first time in its history, has become an inhabitant of cities—homo
urbanus—as the majority of the world’s population now lives and dies far
from the woods of Thoreau and Emerson.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger has come
to speak about her latest book The Sweetness of a Simple Life and one
thing she says early on in her talk holds my attention. “I’m not a very wealthy
person,” she says, “nor do I intend to be.” This reminds me of Thoreau’s words
in his Journals: “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man hardly
need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his
tend toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let
your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”

Fritz
Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, published in
1973,is in the same vein of thought—voluntary simplicity and frugality—as
Beresford-Kroeger’s thought and challenges our progress-based economics and the myth that happiness is
purchased through higher levels of consumption. She belongs to an ancient
family in Ireland,
part of the Druidic tradition, and has long committed herself to the protection
of the world’s forests, as can be seen from her earlier work. She now tells us
a story about her search for the sacred tree of the First Nations People. The
Red Cedar tree, also known as the Tree of
Life for its diverse benefits, was almost completely wiped out of
existence—like the whales and the grizzlies of B.C.—as a result of European and
post-European contact. While it might be difficult for us to imagine the
significance and sacredness of a tree, some would say that that sense of
sacredness and meaning can be evinced through the portrayal of the “Tree of
Souls” in James Cameron’s film Avatar.

The
subtitle of Beresford-Kroeger’s book reads “Tips for Healthier, Happier, and
Kinder Living Gleaned from the Wisdom and Science of Nature,” and that might by
itself paint a portrait of the lady on stage. She speaks with the wizened air
of a grandmother, doling out advice to her eager-to-run-around child, advice
that though might seem silly and naïve, contains truth nonetheless.

In
the end, we must remember the beginning, and all that has passed since. We need
a process of “active remembering,” to keep alive the wisdom of the ages, and
not be deluded into accepting our own present-day reality as the absolute
truth. Those who have spoken about the need for a simpler existence, unfettered
by modern day contrivances which sell on account of their plastic packaged
purpose of “simplicity” and “happiness,” these speakers are chastised for
propagating a return to the stone-age. But this accusation itself is based on
what Mackinnon has spoken of as the shifting baseline and totally abnegates the
past. The now-as-it-is becomes the norm. But “when we talk about a ‘norm,’”
says Gary Snyder, “we’re talking about the grain of things in the larger
picture. Living close to earth, living more simply, living more responsibly,
are all quite literally in the grain of things… I will stress, and keep
stressing, these things, because one of the messages I feel I have to
convey—not as a preaching but as a demonstration hidden within poetry—is of
deeper harmonies and deeper simplicities, which are essentially sanities, even
though they appear irrelevant, impossible, behind us, ahead of us, or right
now."

“Right now” is an illusion, too.” Snyder’s point connects the thought and
purpose of Beresford-Kroeger and Mackinnon: we need to remember that we once
lived simpler lives, and that was better for all of us. And that no matter how
outrageous it might seem now, given especially our proclivity for social
amnesia, it is still possible to live that way.